Hypergraph Application on Business Process Performance

information

Article

Hypergraph Application on Business Process Performance

Khawla Bouafia *, and B?lint Moln?r

Information Systems Department, Faculty of Informatics, E?tv?s Lor?nd University (ELTE), 1117 Budapest, Hungary; molnarba@inf.elte.hu * Correspondence: bouafia@inf.elte.hu These authors contributed equally to this work.

Abstract: The modeling of the graphical representation of business processes (BP) or workflows in enterprise information systems (IS) is often to represent various activities, entities, relations, functions, and communicate between them in an enterprise to achieve the major goal of operational support. In this work, we decided to use graph representation approaches, especially hypergraphs to depict the complex relationships that exist among the artifacts and constituents of BP for more efficient and accurate manipulations. We used bipartite and further hypergraph formats for storing and curating data. We have investigated the various descriptive languages and representation models of BP as process modeling, workflow and process integration, and object-oriented (OO) languages. We have carried out experiments using different approach combinations, but for observing quiltedrepresentation, we focused on the main consistencies of "DBP". As the final approach, we used the "DBP" stream and data schemes that are defined by us to proceed with using pure Python for manually generating data and external Python libraries to store, curate, and visualize "DBP".

Citation: Bouafia, K.; Moln?r, B. Hypergraph Application on Business Process Performance. Information 2021, 12, 370. 10.3390/info12090370

Academic Editors: Robert Stanislawski and Agnieszka Zakrzewska-Bielawska

Received: 8 August 2021 Accepted: 6 September 2021 Published: 13 September 2021

Publisher's Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Copyright: ? 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Keywords: hypergraph theory; BP models; bipartite graph; hypergraph representation; patterns; generation and simulation BP data

1. Introduction

Nowadays, the term BP modeling and its management play an important role in organizations because they make available their business and data in a format that designers can use for their models to represent the different processes. The hypergraph representation has shown its superiority in correlation formulation among samples, and has broad applications for solving problems in several domains and various fields. The goal of this paper is to show the value of several models by establishing a taxonomy for the negative and positive features (advantages and disadvantages) that facilitate making comparison analysis between models. These similarities aid us in finding a syntactical element in the representation codes and functionalities that prove helpful for the models' transformations. The other aim is to show the importance role of the hypergraph in different domains, and especially for BP performance.

The hypergraph is widely used, which proves its importance nowadays. The representation of the hypergraph concept implemented in Python using matrices and forms can be applied in our future works. The hypergraph implemented is used for process instances by several new methods, and the implementation aims to represent the hypergraph in different ways for easier use later.

The paper structure follows the introduction with the second section, which introduces several basic concepts associated with BP definition, while the third section defines the concept of BP modeling, its patterns, and the purpose of those various BP modeling tools.

A survey on existing models with a detailed list of advantages and disadvantages for each model is represented in the fourth section. In the same section, we summarize the comparative points between the previously listed models. The relevant theories of the

Information 2021, 12, 370.



Information 2021, 12, 370

2 of 20

hypergraph as a sound ground representation, application domains, and their importance are presented in Section five.

In the sixth section, an experimental part is represented with the various tools used. The later three dedicated approaches that we established during research are defined in the seventh section. This is followed by the different ways of representation.

The last section defines hypergraph-based representation for BP. Finally, the conclusion summarized the various ideas discussed in the paper and describes future work, which explains the expression of the hypergraph for ameliorating BP representation.

2. Business Processes The notion of process has become an important asset for daily life in organizations

and enterprises. It helps to achieve organizational objectives and defines IS management. It has a relevant role related to the concept of information. The use of BP can be considered diverse, according to the view of the company or the structure of resources used. Taking into consideration various references, there are several perspectives defining and conceptualizing BP:

The definition below is a combination of [1,2] in order to well define the concept:

Definition 1. BP is a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer. Generally, it is a set of activities undertaken in a specific objective that can accomplish a specific organizational goal.

Another definition from [3] mentioned the following:

Definition 2. A BP is a step-by-step algorithm to achieve a business objective when the steps of the process are called activities.

The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) defines BP as follows:

Definition 3. A BP is a set of procedures or activities related to each other to collectively achieve a business purpose by challenging roles and functional interactions within an organizational structure.

In addition, this definition given by [4] describes the term BP as follows:

Definition 4. BPs are a structured set of work activities that lead to specified business outcomes for customers.

Grover and Teng [5] introduced BP as well by the following:

Definition 5. A BP is nothing more than logically related tasks that use the resources of a company to achieve its defined business outcome.

The term BP is intended to embrace not only the control flow [6], i.e., the chronological sequence of function execution, but also the descriptions of data, organizations, and resources that are directly associated with it.

The definition of BP can be simple, including solely a sequence of activities, or a complex, including a controlled composition of services and activities performed under condition, in parallel, or encapsulated in sub-processes. In order to define a BP, it is necessary to define the following: ? Activities which are the basic elements of a BP and assignment of resources. ? Business services providing a business operation. ? Business logic, including the rules that define the control through flow during the

BP execution.

Information 2021, 12, 370

3 of 20

A detailed consideration of the various referenced definitions is excluded from the scope of this paper. The focus of this paper is on a BP model, and the definitions listed in this paragraph are all acceptable definitions to accomplish the set goals. The next section explores a BP modeling concept.

3. Modeling of Business Processes and Its Patterns We often model BP to represent the activities, items, entities, their relation, and

intercommunication between them in an enterprise, which are needed for its success. BP modeling and management [7] today emphasize the term BP because it renders available the business and data in a format that designers can use for models.

Within a definition for a BP, in the last section, the next step is to define the BP model, which is generally an abstract representation of reality that excludes much of the world's infinite detail. According to [8], the concept of the BP model is defined as the following:

Definition 6. The BP model is the abstraction of how systems and individuals collaborate to meet a business need described in the notation and representation of knowledge and expertise of the practice of the profession.

Another definition mentioned in [9] is as follows:

Definition 7. The model is an abstract representation of reality. Details that are unnecessary are not included as a rule in most modeling efforts. The modeler determined which aspects of the real system are of interest and which system elements are to be modeled.

A BP model or schema is a formal representation that must present all the elements as well as the objective or the reason behind the creation of the process, the event causing its initialization, the inputs, the outputs, the resources consumed, the activities carried out, and the execution sequence. BP modeling tools that allow process representation is a lighter digital method that can then be transferred to a live automated process.

BP modeling is one of the most commonly used techniques in requirements analysis [10], often taking data flow diagrams as a form. There are several newly developed methods for modeling, and these techniques vary significantly. Most BP modeling approaches focus on some diagram-like graphics, which reveal the coordination between activities in BP.

The BP diagrams should contain activities and activities connectors, a way to represent decision points, and other strategies to express various activity coordination patterns: (patterns mean the recurrence of same basic features during the life cycle of a process) sequential flow, branching, and parallel execution. In the following are defined various basic patterns BP models:

? Sequence is an ordered series of steps following each other, or series of activities where each activity starts after completing the previous one.

? Exclusive choice can be perceived as a branch that comes from a single activity and goes to precisely one of several paths. The path is chosen either by using a decision or by the mean of a condition.

? Parallel split is defined as a gateway that uses a simple control link to partition two or more activities. These activities are processed and run in parallel. We can also define it as a branch from a single activity that dispatches to multiple parallel paths.

? Multiple choice, compared to the exclusive choice, allows the choosability between all possible alternative paths at the performance time. Its execution is made by choosing only one or more parallel branches that satisfy a particular condition.

? Multiple merge is multiple paths merging without any control. It is a point at which one or more branches of the control thread join without synchronization.

? Cycle is a mechanism that uses some conditions to repeat a collection of patterns defining a set of activities, actions, and work tasks, i.e., the same instructions multiple times.

The purposes of various BP modeling tools are as follows:

Information 2021, 12, 370

4 of 20

? A BP model is a kind of plan that guides the flow of the trade from the start to the end to provide a clear understanding of how the process works;

? It provides the basis for improving the process and support BPM requirements; ? It serves as a basis for decision support, affects decisions by setting priorities on

objectives, and works as a basis for obtaining resources; ? It provides consistency and controls the process.

4. Business Process Models 4.1. Existing Business Process Models

Several researchers made a comparison between various existing models [11] and compared them based on four views of a BP, namely, the informational view, the functional view, the dynamic view, and the organizational view. In a previous study [12], we compared several BP tools based on structural, syntactic and semantic factors. In the literature, there exist different BP models and languages as bellow:

4.2. Petri-Nets The classical petri-net was invented by Carl Adam Petri in the 1960s Since then,

researchers have used it to model and analyze all kinds of processes with applications ranging from communication protocols, hardware, and embedded systems to flexible manufacturing systems and user interactions. Recently, researchers extended the classical Petri-net with color, time, and hierarchy [13]. These extensions facilitate the modeling of complex processes, where data and time are important factors.

Petri-nets gained an increase in usage and acceptance as a method for describing information flow and control [14]. As a modeling language, it graphically depicts the distributed system's structure as a directed graph with annotations. Such Petri-nets have place nodes, transition nodes, and directed arcs connecting places with transitions. Petrinets model the dynamic behavior of systems. The places of a Petri-net contain tokens; the firing of transitions removes tokens from the input places of the transition and adds them to its output places.

Example 1. Figure 1 shows Petri-nets firing rules (, Accessed Date: 7 November 2020). (A) An unmarked net with one transition t1 with two input places, p1 and p2, and one output place, p3. (B) The marked net, the net with places populated by tokens; the net before firing the enabled transition t1. (C) The marked net after firing transition t1, two tokens from place p1 and one from place p2, are removed and transported to place p3.

Figure 1. Firing rules of Petri-nets.

Information 2021, 12, 370

5 of 20

4.2.1. Finite State Machines (FSM) An FSM is a well-known model for formal system specification. It is also a standard

model used in the mathematical foundation of computer science. This model concept is defined and discussed in innumerable books and papers. An FSM is a behavioral model that contains states and transitions. In our dissertation, FSM representation is often used as a BP model--the focus of this section. We present its components and its utility in detail.

FSM is composed of three sets: a set of states, a set of actions, and a set of transitions labeled between states--an initial state and final states. It has a five-element tuple: A = (M, Q, qo, F, R), where M is an input alphabet, Q is a finite set of states of A, qo in Q is the initial state, F Q is the final states, and R : Q X - Q is the transition function.

Figure 2 shows the structure and the different elements of the FSM, where s0 is the initial state, s f is the final state, and a, b, c, d, e, f , g, i are transitions.

Figure 2. FSM structure.

4.2.2. Business Process Model Notation (BPMN)

BPMN is a fundamental ontology that represents domain information model entities. BPMN [15] creates a standard to fill the gap between the design and implementation of BP. It provides a visual language in the form of graphical notation for defining BP in a diagram.

BPMN is a standard language for describing BP, particularly at the domain analysis level and high-level system design. A growing number of process design, EA, and workflow automation tools provide modeling environments for BPMN.

The most significant advantage of BPMN is that it is a standard with a well-defined syntax. Therefore, many business analysts are familiar with it, which makes collaboration much more effortless. Additionally, most modeling tools support BPMN (https: //blog/diagrams/business-process-modelling-techniques/, Accessed Date: 8 November 2020), which makes it much easier to share and edit, even if using different software. All these make BPMN the most popular BP modeling technique at the moment.

Figure 3 describes an example where an order of an iPhone from eBay (. com/blog/examples/bpmn-templates-model-processes/, Accessed Date: 8 November 2020) is expressed by a BP.

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download